Take it from Slipped Disc, the self-styled “#1 Classical Music News Site,” which reported as follows in May 2019. “After all the previews, no major media descended on Tulsa, Oklahoma, to review Lucia Lucas, a transgender baritone, sing the first Don Giovanni of her kind, curated by Tobias Picker.” That’s Mozart’s Don Giovanni, mind you, and Tobias Picker, at the time Tulsa Opera’s artistic director, is also an opera composer of proven stature.
Next time out, Lucas and Picker landed a bull’s-eye. That was in October, when top German-language critics flocked to the picturesque Swiss city of St. Gallen for Picker’s Lili Elbe, starring Lucas as the Danish painter, née Einar Wegener, who was the first patient in medical history to undergo gender-affirmation surgery. “Yes!,” Lucas replied when Picker mooted the project. “That’s my story.” Live video of the world premiere is now available to stream on demand.
Movie buffs may flash on Tom Hooper’s moody romance The Danish Girl, which won Eddie Redmayne a best-actor Oscar nomination back in 2016 but also got pushback because the screenplay was based on a novel. With Lucas onboard as dramaturg, the opera supposedly sticks closer to the truth.
But what is truth? Like vintage photographs of the historic Lili, Redmayne’s willowy, purring androgyne casts a spell the Junoesque, stolidly Victorian Lucas comes nowhere near. And for goodness’ sake, Lucas sounds like Wotan—a role in her repertoire for which she may have the muscle if not the nuance. (Gender-affirmation procedures, we’re told, leave the adult male voice unaffected.)
Startlingly, Aryeh Lev Stollman’s libretto (written and sung in English) maps Lili’s emergence on the struggle of Orpheus clawing his way to light from the land of the dead. But the dénouement takes a less mythic than Gothic twist. Yearning for motherhood, Lili signs on for a transplant of the entire female reproductive apparatus. What becomes of the dim, unsuspecting donor? We’re not told, but Lili pays with her life.
Embraced by the German press, Picker’s score pays tribute to the interwar period of the action in an artful collage of the arty, experimental singsong known as Sprechstimme, hot Weill-in-Weimar dance breaks, and scads of lush, if too often gloomy, Straussian post-Romanticism.
As Gerda, Einar’s understanding and enabling wife, the diamond-clear soprano and Marilyn lookalike Sylvia D’Eramo has herself a triumph. Another standout is the icily precise male soprano Théo Imart in a trifecta of contrasting supporting roles, all female. In looks, Imart seems an Erté poster come to life—and in a different opera he’d be a shoo-in for Lili. But that would be an opera driven by the arc of the story rather than the identity of the performer for whom it was conceived.
The bass Msimelelo Mbali turns in a sharp portrait of Professor Warnekros, a surgeon with Messianic visions of the Nobel Prize dancing in his head. Kristján Jóhannesson, another bass, shines as Denmark’s tongue-in-cheek King Christian X, absurdly affirming Lili’s legal womanhood by royal decree.
There’s never a dull moment in Krystian Lada’s carnivalesque production, and Frank Fannar Pedersen’s jazz-age dances are a kick and a half. Modestas Pitrenas conducts the score like he wrote it.
Lili Elbe is available for streaming on the Opera Vision Web site until June 8, 2024
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii